wonderful article about my favorite hip hop group not named outkast, and the greatest hip hop album of our generation (not up for debate) 
DEAD PREZ WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING | AFROPUNK
Released on March 14, 2000, the 18-track debut by the Florida/New York duo of stic.man (Khnum Ibomu) and M-1 (Mutulu Olugbala), is a piece of art-as-propaganda, meant to provoke and inspire. To my young mind, Let’s Get Free became a guide to the world as seen through a politically-educated, pro-Black, pro-working-class lens, and a tool to challenge all that I had been indoctrinated into, by my formal education and the media I consumed.
The album is as prescient of today’s zeitgeist, as it was a sober examination of history and the world of its time. These days it’s common to see criticism of capitalism in the public sphere — calling out the ills of this economic system is no longer a mainstream taboo — but it wasn’t back then. In 1998, as hip-hop leaned into conspicuous consumption and aspirational excess, dead prez first released the single “Police State,” stic.man got to the heart of the matter when he proposed that we “organize the wealth into a socialist economy.” It was a deadly-serious track that broached the topics of police violence, militarization, and state surveillance, years before there was or a Patriot Act, or police departments regularly trotted out military-grade equipment to quell protests, as they did in Ferguson.
Let’s Get Free begins with “Wolves,” an impassioned speech by Uhuru Movement’s Chairman Omali Yeshytela, a lifelong activist, as well as stic and M-1’s ideological forbear. The tone is set with an allegory: Yeshytela says that certain indigenous peoples in the Arctic have a clever method of killing prowling wolves. Through the use of a double-edged knife, with a blood-covered blade stuck in ice, the wolves’ own appetite and survival instinct is used against them and they are made to kill themselves. The metaphor explains how living under capitalism and white supremacy has trapped the Black community in self-destructive cycles, and asks us to turn our attention to our true adversary: “You don’t blame the person, the victim/ You blame the oppressor! Imperialism, white power is the enemy,” Yeshytela thunders.
DEAD PREZ WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING | AFROPUNK
Released on March 14, 2000, the 18-track debut by the Florida/New York duo of stic.man (Khnum Ibomu) and M-1 (Mutulu Olugbala), is a piece of art-as-propaganda, meant to provoke and inspire. To my young mind, Let’s Get Free became a guide to the world as seen through a politically-educated, pro-Black, pro-working-class lens, and a tool to challenge all that I had been indoctrinated into, by my formal education and the media I consumed.
The album is as prescient of today’s zeitgeist, as it was a sober examination of history and the world of its time. These days it’s common to see criticism of capitalism in the public sphere — calling out the ills of this economic system is no longer a mainstream taboo — but it wasn’t back then. In 1998, as hip-hop leaned into conspicuous consumption and aspirational excess, dead prez first released the single “Police State,” stic.man got to the heart of the matter when he proposed that we “organize the wealth into a socialist economy.” It was a deadly-serious track that broached the topics of police violence, militarization, and state surveillance, years before there was or a Patriot Act, or police departments regularly trotted out military-grade equipment to quell protests, as they did in Ferguson.
Let’s Get Free begins with “Wolves,” an impassioned speech by Uhuru Movement’s Chairman Omali Yeshytela, a lifelong activist, as well as stic and M-1’s ideological forbear. The tone is set with an allegory: Yeshytela says that certain indigenous peoples in the Arctic have a clever method of killing prowling wolves. Through the use of a double-edged knife, with a blood-covered blade stuck in ice, the wolves’ own appetite and survival instinct is used against them and they are made to kill themselves. The metaphor explains how living under capitalism and white supremacy has trapped the Black community in self-destructive cycles, and asks us to turn our attention to our true adversary: “You don’t blame the person, the victim/ You blame the oppressor! Imperialism, white power is the enemy,” Yeshytela thunders.
